After marriage equality, let’s focus on federal LGBT protections

FILE - In this March 31, 2015 file photo, Barbara Hall, right, of Little Rock, joins others at a rally against a new religious objections law outside the Capitol in Little Rock, Ark. The national focus on whether new religious objections laws in Indiana and Arkansas could be used to discriminate against gays and lesbians has boosted efforts for broader civil rights law protections in those and other states. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston, File)

Photo: Danny Johnston, Associated Press

With the floodgates open for same-sex marriage in all 50 states, it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the battle for gay rights is over in America.

But last month’s landmark Supreme Court ruling — and the jubilant, long-overdue celebrations with which so many Americans greeted it — marks one battle won, not the overall war.

Gay-rights leaders are turning their attention to fighting discriminatory practices in employment and housing, and the rest of the country must fight with them.

Here’s the good news: Some 22 states already ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and most of them include protections for transgender people.

The bad news? Not all of those states enforce the anti-discrimination provisions equally. And that still leaves us with a solid majority of states that don’t have anti-discrimination protections at all.

This means that there are still huge swaths of the country where people who are gay, lesbian or transgender can be fired or refused housing simply for being themselves.

The opponents can spin it however they’d like — right now, the approach of many Southern governors seems to be that they need to protect “religious liberty” — but this state of affairs is unconscionable in America in 2015.

The best, most comprehensive answer to combatting housing and employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a federal statute.

This is the approach that’s worked best for racial, gender and religious discrimination, and it’s the big prize that gay-rights groups have been working steadily toward for many years.

“Federal protections are what we all want, and what I think must be a high priority for the LGBT community,” said Rick Zbur, executive director of Equality California, one of the state’s most visible LGBT rights organizations.

California already has laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and identity, but, as Zbur said, “Until we have protections across the country, LGBT people risk losing their rights when they leave the state. Plus, we all have friends and family members in other parts of the country — they deserve to have equal rights, too.”

Unfortunately, the Republican-dominated Congress is unlikely to pass a federal statute.

An employment anti-discrimination act was blocked by House Republicans earlier this year.

Though a Democratic senator, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, has pledged to introduce a new bill within the next few months that will add sexual orientation and identity protections to the Civil Rights Act, many LGBT activists anticipate slogging through another slow battle of attrition.

“We should be pressing Congress for this, but we also need to be real,” Zbur said. “Some of what happened with marriage equality is that we achieved success by being successful a state at a time. We were able to move the ball forward with that one-by-one process. We can continue having a similar strategy with an anti-discrimination statute.”

Another important piece in the attrition strategy has been President Obama’s executive orders, outlawing sexual orientation and identity discrimination in federal hiring. Those policies affect millions of American workers, across all state lines, and they have played a role in bringing private industry into the fold because many federal contractors work for outside companies.

Over time these orders, which were signed last year, could have a significant impact in states that have been more reluctant to advance equal protections.

In the shorter term, there are also opportunities for some relatively easy victories to expand protections in states such as New York and New Hampshire, which have anti-discrimination laws for gays and lesbians but none yet for transgender people.

Another key is simply public awareness: Many people, even in California, don’t realize that there are still plenty of states that permit discrimination against LGBT people. With marriage equality in the headlines, now is the time to let people know that this is a situation that has to change.